Peter Straub Stephen King - Black House

Black House

By Stephen King and Peter Straub

BY STEPHEN KING

Novel s

Carrie

'Salem 's Lot

The Shining

The Stand

The Dead Zone

Firestarter

Cujo

The Dark Tower:

The Gunslinger

Christine

Cycle of the Werewolf

Pet Sematary

The Talisman (with Peter Straub)

It

The Eyes of the Dragon

Misery

The Tommyknockers

The Dark Tower II:

The Drawing of the Three

The Dark Half

The Dark Tower III:

The Waste Lands

Needful Things

Gerald 's Game

Dolores Claiborne

Insomnia

Rose Madder

The Green Mile

Desperation

The Dark Tower IV:

Wizard &Glass

Bag of Bones

Storm of the Century

The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon

Hearts in Atlantis

Dreamcatcher

Black House (with Peter Straub)

E-books

Riding the Bullet

The Plant

Non-fiction

Danse Macabre

On Writing

Secret Windows

As Richard Bachman

Rage

The Long Walk

Roadwork

The Running Man

Thinner

The Regulators

Collections

Nightshift

Different Seasons

Skeleton Crew

Four Past Midnight

Nightmares and Dreamscapes

Six Stories

Screenplays

Creepshow

Cat 's Eye

Silver Bullet

Maximum Overdrive

Pet Sematary

Golden Years

Sleepwalkers

Storm of the Century

BY PETER STRAUB

Novels

Marriages

Under Venus

Julia

If You Could See Me Now

Ghost Story

Shadowland

Floating Dragon

The Talisman (with Stephen King)

Koko

Mystery

Mrs.God

The Throat

The Hellfire Club

Mr.X

Black House (with Stephen King)

Poetry

Open Air

Leeson Park &Belsize Square

Collections

Wild Animals

Houses Without Doors

Peter Straub's Ghosts (editor)

Magic Terror

This is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters, with the exception of a few well-known historical figures, are products of the authors' imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental. Where real-life historical figures appear, the situations, incidents and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict the actual events or to change the entirely fictional nature of the work.

Permission acknowledgments

I CAN'T GET STARTED, by Ira Gershwin andVernon Duke

(c) 1935 (Renewed) Ira Gershwin Music and Chappell & Co.

All Rights o/b/o Ira Gershwin Music administered by WB Music Corp.

All Rights Reserved. Used by permission.

WARNER BROS. PUBLICATIONS U.S. INC., Miami, FL 33014

QUEEN OF THE WORLD, by Gary Louris, Tim O'Reagan, Bob Ezrin

(c) 2000 Warner-Tamerlane Publishing Corp. (BMI), Absinthe Music (BMI)

& Under-Cut-Music Publ. Co. (PRS).

All Rights o/b/o Absinthe Music administered by Warner-Tamerlane Publishing Corp.

All Rights Reserved. Used by permission.

WARNER BROS. PUBLICATIONS U.S. INC., Miami, FL 33014

WHEN THE RED, RED ROBIN COMES BOB, BOB BOBBIN' ALONG

Written by Harry Woods

(c) 1926, renewed

All rights controlled by Callicoon Music.

Used by permission. All rights reserved.

HarperCollins Publishers

77-85 Fulham Palace Road,

Hammersmith,

London W6 8JB

www.fireandwater.com

Published by HarperCollins Publishers 2001

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

Published in the USA by

Random House 2001

Copyright (c) Stephen King and Peter Straub 2001

Stephen King and Peter Straub assert the moral right to

be identified as the authors of this work

A catalogue record for this book

is available from the British Library

ISBN 0 00 710042 6

Set in Bembo

Printed and bound in Great Britain by

Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be

reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted,

in any form or by any means, electronic mechanical,

photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior

Permission of the publishers.

For David Gernert and Ralph Vicinanza

You take me to a place I never go,

You send me kisses made of gold,

I'll place a crown upon your curls,

All hail the Queen of the World!

- The Jayhawks

Right Here and Now...

Part One

WELCOME TO COULEE

COUNTRY

RIGHT HERE AND NOW, as an old friend used to say, we are in the fluid present, where clear-sightedness never guarantees perfect vision. Here: about two hundred feet, the height of a gliding eagle, above Wisconsin's far western edge, where the vagaries of the Mississippi River declare a natural border. Now: an early Friday morning in mid-July a few years into both a new century and a new millennium, their wayward courses so hidden that a blind man has a better chance of seeing what lies ahead than you or I. Right here and now, the hour is just past six A.M., and the sun stands low in the cloudless eastern sky, a fat, confident yellow-white ball advancing as ever for the first time toward the future and leaving in its wake the steadily accumulating past, which darkens as it recedes, making blind men of us all.

Below, the early sun touches the river's wide, soft ripples with molten highlights. Sunlight glints from the tracks of the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad running between the riverbank and the backs of the shabby two-story houses along County Road Oo, known as Nailhouse Row, the lowest point of the comfortable-looking little town extending uphill and eastward beneath us. At this moment in the Coulee Country, life seems to be holding its breath. The motionless air around us carries such remarkable purity and sweetness that you might imagine a man could smell a radish pulled out of the ground a mile away.

Moving toward the sun, we glide away from the river and over the shining tracks, the backyards and roofs of Nailhouse Row, then a line of Harley-Davidson motorcycles tilted on their kickstands. These unprepossessing little houses were built, early in the century recently vanished, for the metal pourers, mold makers, and crate men employed by the Pederson Nail factory. On the grounds that working stiffs would be unlikely to complain about the flaws in their subsidized accommodations, they were constructed as cheaply as possible. (Pederson Nail, which had suffered multiple hemorrhages during the fifties, finally bled to death in 1963.) The waiting Harleys suggest that the factory hands have been replaced by a motorcycle gang. The uniformly ferocious appearance of the Harleys' owners, wild-haired, bushy-bearded, swag-bellied men sporting earrings, black leather jackets, and less than the full complement of teeth, would seem to support this assumption. Like most assumptions, this one embodies an uneasy half-truth.

The current residents of Nailhouse Row, whom suspicious locals dubbed the Thunder Five soon after they took over the houses along the river, cannot so easily be categorized. They have skilled jobs in the Kingsland Brewing Company, located just out of town to the south and one block east of the Mississippi. If we look to our right, we can see "the world's largest six-pack," storage tanks painted over with gigantic Kingsland Old-Time Lager labels. The men who live on Nailhouse Row met one another on the Urbana-Champaign campus of the University of Illinois, where all but one were undergraduates majoring in English or philosophy. (The exception was a resident in surgery at the UI-UC university hospital.) They get an ironic pleasure from being called the Thunder Five: the name strikes them as sweetly cartoonish. What they call themselves is "the Hegelian Scum." These gentlemen form an interesting crew, and we will make their acquaintance later on. For now, we have time only to note the hand-painted posters taped to the fronts of several houses, two lamp poles, and a couple of abandoned buildings. The posters say: FISHERMAN, YOU BETTER PRAY TO YOUR STINKING GOD WE DON'T CATCH YOU FIRST! REMEMBER AMY!